Reach deep down in to your urban bag
for the notorious notebook in which to scribe
other worlds than ever known and all the ways
to attempt to find a way to reach out, to and for them.

There it is in the Head-lines on the way down
into the system and there it is again these
giant megalithic letters of crushed stone
Alpha bits marching across the skyline.

Above the ground, beneath the city itself
in the sky, deep down in the stinking trench
every day is a whole new world ready to burst
another precarious battle when we must confront
the carefully cultivated terror and remember
to remember a memorial for our homeless dead.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.